


Hook or Crook

by rageprufrock



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 12:11:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"$2,000?" Rodney shrieked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hook or Crook

Rodney loves, loves, loves conventions. 

They are filled with physicists and mathematicians and other people who are dumber than Rodney but smart enough to understand the size and scope of his unparalleled intellect and feel achingly cowed by it.

And in Vegas, with all the lights flashing and bells jangling and whistles shrill in the night, Rodney sees all the nerds attack the floor, counting cards and getting babes for possibly the first, last, and likely only time. It's cute, and Rodney enjoys it until casino security gives Rodney the suite for the night in exchange for him getting the fuck away from the Blackjack table and not having to get beat down by two gigantic Italian guys behind the kitchen dumpster. 

The view is gorgeous and the city is all twinkling desert from his enormous windows, and Rodney's drunk enough to wax poetic about it-- 

At least until the complimentary hooker shows up. 

"Oh, hey," Rodney says, "I didn't know I got one of these, too." 

The hooker had raised one thicker-than-usual eyebrow, but then again, Rodney was very, very drunk, and suddenly the very best idea in the world was to lean in and take what was for the taking, all lips and touch and searching hands, a lightly amused laugh in his ear as he was navigated onto the bed and slowly stripped, as larger-than-usual-palms smoothed over his thighs and across his belly and cupped his balls. 

And then Rodney got really proactive about it, with some tackling and nuzzling and affectionate biting, because he turned her over, smoothing a hand over her angular hip and sinking into her hot, hot, body, tight and claustrophobic and it's so good he blacks out--or maybe that was the Jaegermiester. 

When he wakes up, there is a small, angry garage band playing behind his left eye, he's so dehydrated he thinks he's going to die right there, and when he turns over it's to see a very handsome man with hazel eyes staring at him with great bemusement, mussed and naked in bed with Rodney. 

"He lives," the man says. 

Rodney closes his eyes and moans. 

 

*

"You were a man?" Rodney wails for now the fourth time. 

John--his name is John, it's even a man's name--is sitting on the bed, inspecting a dark gray shirt sadly, poking at a loose thread, utterly unconcerned with Rodney's mental breakdown. 

"You were a man?" Rodney repeated. 

John rolls his very pretty eyes. "Yes," he says. "And hey, I hope you're that nice to all the girls. Cause you know women like to be backdoored by a total drunk." He frowns. "You ripped my shirt!" 

Rodney resists clawing at his eyes, but it's very hard. "You're a man! I slept with a man!" 

John sighs and gets up, toeing on his shoes and pulling on his sport coat and oh God how did Rodney think John was a woman? Was there enough Jaegermiester in the world to explain this away? Then, John walks over to Rodney's pants and shirt, abandoned in a pile on the floor because Rodney's perched on a chair at the far corner of the room wrapped up in the hotel duvet like a babushka and digs around until he finds Rodney's wallet, extracts four twenty dollar bills, and pockets them, waving goodbye. 

"Hey, so it was a slice," John says lightly. "You know, have fun in Vegas and everything." 

He's on his way out the door when Rodney rushes out, stumbling over the sheets, to hang onto the doorframe and yell, "Hey! I thought you were complimentary!" 

The last thing he sees is John flipping him the bird from the closing elevator doors--and then he realizes that the entire hall, booked full of scientists is in full attendance, all of them wearing shit-eating grins that could light the whole valley for a week. 

"I thought he was a woman!" Rodney says pleadingly. 

"Oh, so did I," agrees Radek Zelenka, who is wearing a robe and standing in the opened doorway across the hall. 

Rodney scowls and slams the door, which of course catches the blanket and makes him fall down face-first on his own bedroom floor, $80 poorer and suddenly bisexual and oh my God, so hungover. 

 

*

Rodney spends the rest of the day not making eye-contact with anybody he works with and updating his list of people to kill. It's becoming unwieldy, he thinks sadly, and debates putting it into some kind of searchable database. 

If Rodney thought that his lecture later that afternoon would be his savior he was wrong, wrong, wrong, because everybody in the audience decide to slip in snide little hints to his morning's shame, like, "probing" and "reversal" and "math," but maybe Rodney was reading too much into it and he probably shouldn't have made the guy from Science cry. 

When he gets down from his presentation he makes a beeline for the bar, because even if alcohol is what got him into this, he's fairly sure that there are only female hookers in the bar, and that nobody will be sending any complimentary gay side-trips to his hotel tonight. And if they do, well, Rodney wants his $80 back anyway, and that's the only reason he keeps thinking about John--the only one. 

But it turns out that he's going to be thinking about John a lot more because there he is, in yet another tastefully expensive outfit, black shirt and khaki slacks so casually elegant Rodney sort of wants to pull him out of shape, sitting at a dimly lit dinner table with another man with salt and pepper hair and a leisurely smile. 

John's grin is flirty and he reaches over to touch the other man too much, and Rodney wonders if all hookers do their hooking in five star hotel restaurants, at their finest table, but when the gray-haired man reaches over to press a smiling mouth against John's ear, whispering something, Rodney figures that maybe John wasn't so much complimentary as so expensive Rodney would cry. 

John and his...john linger over dessert and espresso and wine and they talk nonstop, John's hands moving in the candlelight until they're caught by his companion and he's led out of the restaurant, right past where Rodney's hunched at the bar, nursing his gin and tonic, wide-eyed with shock as he sees John shoved into the corner of an elevator, laughing as the other man covers John's mouth with his own. 

 

*

The convention is only going to last two more days, so Rodney of course skips the panel that Jeremy Kavanagh--the hack--is hosting and prowls around the hotel looking for his complimentary hooker, because it's not complimentary if they take $80 from you, and also, who the fuck was that other guy? He had to be a hundred years old. Or maybe 60. Definitely close to death. 

And because John is just as infuriating as Rodney figures he would be, Rodney finally finds him at Kavanagh's panel, looking bright-eyed and intrigued, and before Rodney can run up the aisle, snatch him by his sleeve and drag him out of there, John is standing up and asking all sorts of insightful questions that (a) make John look revoltingly smart, (b) make Kavanagh look wonderfully stupid and (c) make Rodney's knees go all weak. 

Rodney actually waits until Kavanagh sputters through a feeble, fallacious rebuttal before he rushes up to John before an adoring crowd of female mathematicians and physicists can form. 

"You," he says. 

John blinks at him, lazy and slow. "Oh, it's you." 

Rodney scowls. 

"Can we speak in private for a moment?" 

John raises his eyebrow at Rodney in a move Rodney remembers pre-gay-sex and that makes his cock jump in a totally alarming and really hot way. 

"What is this about?" John asks suspiciously. 

"Very important things," Rodney snaps, grabs John by the wrist, and starts plowing through the interested crowd. 

When they get to the back elevator bay, near the vending machines and the boiler room, John says, "Wow, this is so Pretty Woman," sarcastically. 

Rodney resists the urge to stamp his feet. "I want my money back," Rodney demands. "You were supposed to be free." 

John stares at him for a bit before crosses his arms over his chest and glares at Rodney. "I thought this was all kind of self-explanatory, but I see I've assumed too much. Lemme explain the concept of an escort to you, Dr. Kavanagh." 

Rodney's mouth falls open for an immediate retort before he says, "Wait--Kavanagh? I'm McKay--Rodney McKay." 

John's expression freezes for a minute before it evens out thoughtfully. "Huh--that explains a lot." 

"I--! You--!" Rodney sputters. 

John rolls his shoulders in a shrug. "Hey, misunderstanding, sorry about the--" John makes a hand motion that could mean anything from circles to anal sex "--backdooring. I'll write you a check later." 

Rodney spends the rest of the night sulking in his enormous bathtub and drinking overpriced room-service wine because he just can't get over the fact that not only did he accidentally get a hooker, he accidentally got Kavanagh's hooker, and really, he thinks beatifically, John should be grateful he knocked on the wrong door. 

 

*

The next morning is about as spectacularly shameful as the one before, and it starts off with Rodney being awoken by a furiously vitriolic Jeremy Kavanagh shoving a print-out of his credit card statement in Rodney's face and demanding $2,000 plus $400 for emotional trauma. 

"He cost you a $2,000?" Rodney yells. 

"I paid for the whole night!" Kavanagh bellows, and Rodney thinks that it answers the question of why he'd stayed. 

"$2,000?" Rodney shrieks. 

"He's the best in the business!" Kavanagh argues, furious. "Give me my money!" 

"I can't deal with you right now," Rodney tells him honestly. "The mental image of John being forced to engage in sexual congress with you is--is having a deleterious effect on my sanity." 

He shuts the door in Kavanagh's still-shouting face and retreats back to the bathtub and the stale bottle of wine he left half-empty the night before. 

 

*

It takes hours before Rodney gathers enough broken fragments of his mind to venture out of his hotel room, and he makes a beeline for the bar--where, of course, of course--he finds John nursing glass of beer, the foam on his mouth giving Rodney all sorts of inappropriate ideas. 

"You," Rodney hisses at John, sliding into the bar stool next to him. 

"Why, hello, Dr. McKay, of course you can sit here," John says sarcastically. 

"You're not dumb," Rodney blurts out. 

John wrinkles his nose at him. "I--what?" 

"Nevermind," Rodney backtracks, and says, "I mean--you understood the lecture? Kavanagh's?" 

Shrugging, John says, "The parts that weren't ludicrous, anyway." 

Rodney feels a straight line fire from his brain to his dick and it's the most exhilaratingly arousing thing ever. "Uh," he says, and his lizard brain fades out in a bliss of pornographic memories just long enough to let him remember why he was looking for John anyway.   
"Wait--hold on a minute. You were--you were getting paid $2000--which, by the way, oh my God--why, why did you find it necessary to take $80 from me?" Rodney snaps. It's not what he should be asking but he's never managed to say the right thing at the right time. 

John rolls his eyes. "You ripped my shirt. You damage the goods, you pay for it." 

Rodney gapes at him for a bit before John shifts in his seat, annoyed. 

"Look, did you have something actually to say to me, or are you just still freaking out about your drunken brush with gayness?" John asks. "Because in case you haven't noticed from all the gross advertising yet--what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." 

Rodney narrows his eyes. "Who was the guy?" he asks. 

John blinks at him. 

"From the other night!" Rodney snaps. "That guy--with the gray hair." 

"Are you really going to be like this?" John whines. "We only did it once and you thought I was a woman." 

"Okay! Fine! Let's just say you rocked my world or whatever people like you like people like me to tell you and will you please just answer the question?" Rodney demands. 

The bartender, who had been walking over to get his order gives him a wide berth, and honestly, Rodney can't find it in himself to blame the guy. 

John laughs, and it loosens out his shoulders as he takes a sip of his beer. "It's really none of your business--but his name was Jack and he had me on retainer." He shrugs. "It was his last visit; we dissolved our contract and now he's back in Colorado playing court martial house as far as I know." 

"Court martial--" 

"Don't ask, Rodney," John says, smiling. 

"Oh my God, you tramp," Rodney declares, and at John's increasingly humorless expression, Rodney hastens to add, "Uh, so--you're like, a free agent again?"   
John stares at him for a bit. "Wow," he says with a quiet kind of awe. "Are you for real?" 

"I'm very, very rich," Rodney replies, a leer creeping across his face even as a more rational part of his mind is shrieking, $2,000 a night 2 billion for life! It really won't be that much of a problem by the time they award him his Nobel, Rodney rationalizes. "Also, I'm not going to get arrested for pinching your ass in public." 

"No, but you'll have a black eye," John says pleasantly, and takes a long, long gulp of his beer, and Rodney watches John's Adam's apple bob as he drinks, swallowing heavily and trying desperately to think unsexy thoughts--Kavanagh, his mother, Kavanagh and his mother. 

"Put it on my tab, Dan," John tells the bartender and stands up, giving Rodney a meaningful look before saying, "Well? I thought we had plans." 

Rodney stumbles off the barstool. "Wow," he says. "Really? That's it? Really?" 

John shrugs. "What can I say, I'm kind of a sure thing," he tells Rodney, grinning. 

"Oh, God, oh no," Rodney moans, and trails John toward the elevators. "You did not just quote that movie at me." 

And not for the first time, what happened in Vegas, didn't manage to stay there.


End file.
